


Five times Keith nearly confessed (and one time Shiro beat him to it)

by narada-talis (sarensen)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: 5 Times, 5+1 Things, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, M/M, Past Adam/Shiro (Voltron), Pining Keith (Voltron), Temporarily Unrequited Love, spans s1-s7
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-14
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-05-07 12:25:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19209391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarensen/pseuds/narada-talis
Summary: Gift fic formhSantiagowho won my 100-follower-giveaway on tumblr. Their prompt was: “Keith deeply in love with Shiro, but it is an unrequited love at the beginning”.Excerpt:And yet even now, with every part of Shiro singularly bent on the destruction of him, even now, he loves him.He says, “I love you,”, but what he means is,I’d love you even if you scarred me, even if you hated me. Even if you killed me, the memory of me would love you anyway.





	Five times Keith nearly confessed (and one time Shiro beat him to it)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mhSantiago](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mhSantiago/gifts).



**1\. Not alone**

Keith stares at himself in the bathroom mirror, gingerly pressing his fingertips into the bruise on the side of his face. Outside his room is a sunny afternoon at the intersection of Summer and Autumn and the ambient sounds of the Galaxy Garrison - jet engines and muffled training drills carried on the wind - but inside is the quiet solitude of a short-term suspension and wondering if this is what _I will never give up on you_ looks like - a swollen cheek and a split lip.

A part of Keith is still convinced James Griffin had it coming. Another, louder part, sees only the quiet disappointment in Shiro's eyes, like an afterimage burned into the backs of his lids.

Keith is sixteen and quietly in love; the kind of love that fills him with panic, with self-doubt, with _I can't do this_ and _What if he leaves_ and _I can't be alone again_ , and also _No one's ever looked at me like that_ and _My heart starts beating faster every time_. It's a catch-twenty two of wanting to run, and knowing he'll only run straight to Shiro.

For once, maybe it isn't a bad thing. For once, just this once, maybe he can get what he wants.

He is gritted teeth and sweaty palms all the way to Shiro's quarters, nervous and determined in a way that won't allow the mocking voice in his head to win. Outside, the sun is just starting to set, and he thinks this is a good time because Shiro likes sunsets.

He opens the door without preamble, his voice breaking over the words, "Shiro, I need to--"

Shiro jerks away from another man, whipping around to face Keith. The top buttons of his shirt are undone, his black hair mussed. His lips are wet, catching the light through the window. He stutters, "K-Keith!" 

Keith freezes, one hand still resting on the doorknob. "I- I'm sorry! Shiro, I didn't mean to--"

The other man is staring at Keith over the rim of his slightly-skew glasses, his expression unreadable. He's tall, and beautiful, and carries himself with an air of maturity Keith can only wish he will one day come into after his clumsy puberty has run its course.

"Keith, this is Adam. We're, ah..."

Keith's eyes flick between Shiro and Adam, his heart pounding. He feels short of breath, the world suddenly unsteady around him. He mumbles, "I gotta go,", and shuts the door quickly.

He doesn't know where he's going, only that he needs to get away. 

He runs.

 

\-------

 

**2\. Kerberos**

Keith spends a year in the desert, alone. 

Adam comes to see him a few times at the shack. They talk, and then they don't, and eventually he stops coming. He leaves Shiro behind as much as Shiro left him. Keith looks at the photo he took of Shiro before the launch, smiling in a way that makes Keith's heart flutter, even now. He thinks about how he was the one Shiro took to the launch, not Adam.

Keith is seventeen and so in love it hurts.

So he spends a year waiting, watching, looking. A year working himself up to confessing to Shiro if he ever sees him again. A year promising himself to nothing, because he's sure he never will. But that's okay - he's used to chasing dreams.

When he does see Shiro again, neither of them are the same. 

Shiro arrives in a maelstrom of fire and confusion, and suddenly Pidge and Lance and Hunk are there, and they escape somehow to the shack, never suspecting the irreversible and magnificent ways their lives would change the next day.

Keith nearly tells Shiro that night. The others are asleep in various states of disarray on what passes for Keith's living room floor. Outside, the moon is nearly full except for a sliver of black cut off the edge, and the crickets and night birds are loud. Inside, Shiro's body twitches with nightmares, and Keith sits a silent vigil, watching the way his metal fingers twist in the covers.

It's nearly dawn when Shiro wakes up. Keith sits forward in his chair, touching his face. Shiro's eyes flicker, then open, and for a long second, all he does is look at Keith.

"You found me," he says eventually, voice weak and underlaid by something Keith's never heard in it before. Something dark, and sad.

He almost says, ' _Of course I found you, I love you_ ,' then; the words he's been waiting to say for so long. He aches to speak them into existence, to give shape to the formless longing fed by Shiro's disappearance, now bigger than Keith in every way and impossible to silence.

But Shiro has a metal arm, and he has scars now that weren't there before. Something in his eyes is haunted, a wild look filled with the ghosts of everything that happened to him while he was gone.

Keith swallows the words, and tries to smile. He says, "You should get some more rest. You're home now."

The relief on Shiro's face is plain, open and clear for all to see. It stabs into the space between Keith's ribs. He sits with Shiro until he falls asleep again. When Shiro wakes up, when he's taken a shower and eaten something and felt the hot desert air on his face again, then Keith will tell him he loves him.

He never gets the chance.

 

\-------

 

**3\. Battle**

Flying the Lions takes a toll on all of them, and especially so after forming Voltron. It's more than just physical. It leaves them mentally exhausted, the kind of fatigue that sinks right into the bones and makes the body heavy and slows words to slurs.

They file into what passes for the Castleship's lounge and flop down onto the sunken couches, too tired to make it to their respective rooms. Shiro slumps sideways onto Keith, ruffling his hair. He's heavy, and too warm, and the sharp angles of his Paladin armor dig into all of Keith's soft places. He tugs on his bracers, dropping them carelessly on the floor.

Shiro says, "Good job out there," and Keith nearly blurts out ' _I love you'_ ; wants to scream it from the topmost turret of the Castleship for everyone in the galaxy to hear. It's the lingering adrenaline from battle, the heart-stopping surety as Galra ion canon lasers shot past them that this would be the end. 

Instead, he mumbles, "You too," and bites down hard enough on his bottom lip to draw blood when Shiro turns his head to smile at him, the ridges of the scar on the bridge of his nose too close.

In the background, Lance and Pidge exchange playful banter. Allura appears through the door, congratulating them on their successful mission. But Keith's whole world has narrowed down to the heavy presence next to him, Shiro's soft breathing and the way his hair smells and the clicking of their armor brushing together.

The sudden urge to touch him is so strong Keith has to shove his hands under his thighs. It hits him in a wave that leaves him aching, a lump in his throat too big to swallow. He extracts himself from Shiro, mumbling something about being tired, and all but runs out of the room.

 

\-------

 

**4\. Empty**

Space is very big, and very dark, and very cold. Keith drifts for months, searching for Shiro, months of nothingness, of sifting through debris to find only despair. Slowly, the others start to give up. One by one, they return to the Castleship until Keith is the only one left in the void, the only one still believing in Shiro, still desperately grasping for the hope that dissolves between his fingers like mist.

He spends days alone in the Red Lion, staring into space, lips forming around the words ' _I love you_ ', only to find his voice doesn't work. Around him is the splendor of a nebula, vivid colors and an effervescence of stars, but the wonder of being among them, seeing their light as it happens instead of years in the past, is lost on him. He feels himself fading into nothing, slowly, as time passes and it becomes less and less likely that Shiro will ever come back.

He aches with everything he never got the chance to say to him. It was never the right time; they were too busy with Voltron, with fighting a war, planning and strategizing their next move or training for battle. Voltron was more important than anything else. They couldn't afford any distractions.

At least, that was what Keith had told himself. Now, alone with only his thoughts and the constant hum of the Lion in the back of his mind, Keith can admit to himself that he had been afraid.

He doesn't want to go back. He can't - not yet - because he knows what's waiting for him there. The faces of the other Paladins, his friends, crumpled in sympathy. The reluctant but unchangeable decision to find a new Black Paladin. The finality of giving up on Shiro, when he knows that Shiro would never do the same to him.

Eventually, fate or the universe or whatever forces were at work to make them the Paladins of Voltron calls to him, and when it becomes too strong to ignore, he steps into the Black Lion, and everything changes. Suddenly he's a leader, suddenly there are people relying on him, making demands of him he isn't sure he can fulfil. And even at the best of times, this is a role he never wanted. One he has to fill, maybe, but never because he chose it.

The wound Shiro's death left behind is still too raw, aching, and Keith feels like all of him is draining out through it. He lashes out, becomes volatile, puts his friends' lives in danger. 

And when he sees Shiro again, drifting in the small Galran pod with his outgrown hair and stubble and those empty, haunted eyes, things have changed so much between them that he doesn't even think about telling him ' _I love you_ ' again until after it's too late.

 

\-------

 

**5\. Too late**

He says the words once. "I love you," - like a prayer, like it's the last thing he'll ever say to Shiro. In every way that counts, it is. His body strains and his arms ache with Shiro's weight, his face on fire where it's cut into by the purple blade of Shiro's hand - no, not Shiro. It wears his face and speaks in his voice, but in his heart of hearts Keith's known all along that it's _not Shiro_. The wrongness of him had sat like heavy stones at the bottom of his lungs, suffocating. And yet even now, with every part of Shiro singularly bent on the destruction of him, even now, he loves him.

He says, "I love you,", but what he means is, _I'd love you even if you scarred me, even if you hated me. Even if you killed me, the memory of me would love you anyway._

They fall into the light together, and the last thing Keith sees is Shiro's face, and then they're standing together in a field of stars. Shiro says he died. He says the Black Lion somehow saved him. He says he's been here, between the stars, all this time. 

Keith should have known. Somehow, despite the impossibility of it, he should have saved Shiro. Instead, he gave up on him, escaped to his Blade missions because he was so convinced Shiro didn't want him.

Now, all he's left with is the empty shell of a clone, and guilt heavier than time or gravity eating away at his insides.

Keith can't bring himself to say "I love you," again.

 

\-------

 

**+1. Shiro**

When Shiro tells Keith, "I love you," it feels like the easiest thing in the world. When he smiles at Keith's wide-eyed shock, when he takes his chin in his fingers and leans down to kiss him softly, there aren't any fireworks. It isn't electric, it isn't explosions of light behind his eyes. It's warm, and it's Keith, and it's home. It's where he was always meant to be, finally at peace, even if only for this one moment.

He pulls away and the desert heat pours back in between them. The ruins of their city, once familiar, now nothing more than dust and rubble and the echoes of destruction, shift quietly beneath their feet. In the distance, others are moving broken stone and laying the foundations for what will be the center of the Voltron Coalition on Earth. Aliens and humans work side by side, the sound of their voices and laughter carried on the wind.

Keith has stripped down to his tank and slacks, sweat beading on his forehead. A smear of black grime mirrors the scar on his other cheek. He's covered in dust and has dark circles under his eyes, pushing too hard after having just woken up in the hospital a few days ago.

He tells Keith he loves him, because it's easier than telling him how he can still feel echoes of Kuron, like deep shadows moving under the veil of his consciousness. How he sometimes remembers himself lunging toward Keith, how he can feel himself fill with rage and the singular urge to destroy the person most precious to him. Still, Kuron deeply, truly, and irrevocably loved Keith, right until the end, until Haggar took over, and for that, Shiro can forgive him almost anything. But despite Keith's reassurances ( _It wasn't you, it was the witch_ , like she was some kind of evil character from a fairytail to be vanquished), he can't tell him about the hatred for himself still seething inside. 

He can't tell Keith how it felt seeing him come down like a comet and strike Sendak to the ground, or how watching the Lions fall to Earth after the Robeast exploded tore his heart to pieces all over again. He can't tell him how he'd sat by his bedside, fingers lingering on the bandages around his head, and prayed he'd have the chance to say anything at all to him again. And when Keith came back to him - when by some miracle, he woke up - Shiro couldn't wait any longer.

So he tells him he loves him, and hopes that Keith will understand anyway.

Keith's shock only lasts a second, and then he's on top of Shiro, jumping into his arms and twisting his legs around his hips. Shiro's arms curl around him reflexively, carrying his weight despite his surprise. Keith feels like he was always meant to fit against him this way. His palms are warm on Shiro's cheeks, his lips warmer where they press against his mouth.

It's forgiveness. It's _I'm sorry_ and _Never do that to me again_ and _I waited for so long._

And then they're kissing like it's the last thing they'll ever do, and it feels like everything that was wrong with the world is suddenly right.

There was no happy ending for Kuron. Sometimes Shiro wonders if there will be for him. 

But then Keith takes his hand and laces their fingers together, and smiles that small, sweet smile of his, and Shiro's heart fills with the knowledge that no matter what happens, they will always have each other. 

And that's enough of a happy ending for him. 

**Author's Note:**

> I am on [tumblr](https://narada-talis.tumblr.com) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/solooutomg) 👀

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Five times Keith nearly confessed (and one time Shiro beat him to it) by narada-talis](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21907225) by [taikodragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/taikodragon/pseuds/taikodragon)




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